7 Key Strategies To Elevate Customer Experience in Banking

To reduce churn and improve customer satisfaction, it’s important to focus heavily on customer experience: Financial institutions that deliver outstanding customer experience receive twice as many recommendations as their competitors. 

Consumers expect convenient, seamless, and accessible financial services and products, and the businesses that provide these will do well. Likewise, businesses that ignore their customers’ preferences may risk leading them to the competition.  

In this guide, we’ll cover seven strategies that will help you improve your bank’s customer journey. 

Understanding Customer Expectations in Banking

People expect remarkable customer service, regardless of industry. Customers aren’t comparing customer experiences from bank to bank. They simply want to find the financial brand that provides the best customer experience. 

According to data from Zendesk, here are some customer experience trends to consider:

• 72% of customers want immediate service.
• 70% of customers expect the person they interact with to provide them with assistance instead of redirecting them. 
• 62% of customers agree that personalization recommendations are superior to generic ones. 

 

Unfortunately, banks tend to fall behind other industries when it comes to customer experience. However, the most successful banks are known for providing convenient and accessible digital banking services.

For example, many banks offer mobile check deposits. This banking industry feature allows customers to take a snapshot of a check, which the bank can then immediately deposit into their bank account. 

As a result, the customer can save time waiting in a long line at their local branch or ATMs. In more ways, banks rely on financial technology (fintech) to deliver convenient solutions for their customers.

7 Strategies To Enhance Customer Experience in Banking

If you’re running a financial institution, customer experience will make or break your business. With that said, here are seven strategies you can employ to deepen your customer relationships and build a competitive advantage. 

1. Banks That Offer Exchange Services

For banks and fintech service providers, introducing a white-label exchange delivers numerous benefits:

• Improved customer experience: With a white label exchange, the digital asset services carry the bank or fintech’s own branding, style, and user experience. This creates a seamless, omnichannel feel. 
• Faster time to market: Building an in-house digital asset exchange is expensive and time-intensive. White-label software dramatically accelerates time to market from over a year to just 3-4 months. 
• Reduced costs: White-label exchange software mitigates the need for internal blockchain and trading experts and handles maintenance, security, liquidity provisioning, and other technical aspects. These cost savings mean companies can reallocate resources to focus on core competencies.
• Scalability: Leading white-label providers use cloud-based infrastructure to efficiently scale as customer demand grows. This prevents disruption even amidst surging user numbers and trading volumes.
• Regulatory compliance: Navigating the web of regulations around digital assets is complex, but reputable white-label providers continuously update their software to satisfy relevant compliance standards. This ensures companies can confidently launch and scale their offering without prohibitively high regulatory risk.

 

However, it’s important to remember that not all white-label providers are created equal. The core components of a white-label digital asset exchange include:

• Intuitive trading platform with real-time order books, charting, and analytics
• Secure wallet functionality for customers to store purchased assets
• Aggregations with major exchanges to ensure adequate liquidity
• Seamless payment integration for fiat currency deposits and withdrawals
• KYC and AML verification to prevent fraud and meet compliance regulations
• Robust reporting tools providing data-driven insights on user activity

 

Banks and fintechs can use these features to provide a trustworthy digital asset exchange experience with their own brand.

2. Embrace a Customer-Centric Approach

Customer centricity is all about putting the customer at the heart of your business decisions. This means understanding customer needs, preferences, and pain points and tailoring your banking products, services, and interactions accordingly. 

This may include leveraging single-platform streamlined access to digital assets to meet the financial needs of today’s sophisticated user base, like eToro, Robinhood, or SoFi.

A customer-centric approach like this will foster empathy and demonstrate that you prioritize their satisfaction.

For example, if you’re dealing with a customer who’s ill-suited for your business, you can be candid and transparent while referring them to another solution. This proves that you care more about their satisfaction than onboarding them to a solution that doesn’t suit them.

3. Personalize Interactions

If you want to deliver an incredible banking customer experience, it’s best to go beyond generic interactions and personalize communication, product recommendations, and social media offers based on each customer’s unique financial situation and preferences. 

This personalization will make customers feel valued and understood, enhancing their overall experience. Fortunately, you can deliver personalized interactions with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. 

For example, SoFi has a robo-advisor service that helps customers make investing decisions. Customers can inform the advisor about their risk tolerance and general preferences, and then the advisor will curate the best investment decisions from their output. 

The robo-advisor can even make automatic investment decisions for them, which is the hallmark of personalized financial services. 

4. Embark on Digital Transformation

Banks and credit unions can implement innovative features, such as chatbots, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistants, and data-driven insights, to provide personalized support, proactive communication, and tailored financial advice. 

For example, ChatGPT makes it possible for financial institutions to program automatic chatbots that respond to thousands of possible queries from an online contact center. 

Streamlining your customer support with a self-help option can cut down on your call volumes and give your customers the answers they need.

5. Empower Customers With Self-Service Tools

Accessibility and simplicity are important factors in customer experience, but convenience is paramount: Businesses are busy and need the freedom to perform vital operations without going through a dedicated account representative every time. 

Financial institutions can provide business customers with on-exchange  self-service tools, allowing their traders and investors to independently manage accounts, execute trades, and monitor their portfolios:

• Account management capabilities that enable clients to edit and control their own accounts
• Knowledge bases with searchable databases of topics, articles, and tutorials
• Convenient data access, including charting and analytics for portfolio management

6. Embrace Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is never to be taken personally. In fact, feedback is a form of first-party data that actually tells you what your customers think across different touchpoints. 

Generating customer feedback is free and offers clear insights into how you can adapt your operations to best suit your customers. 

As a result, make sure to actively listen to customer feedback, both positive and negative. Use this feedback to address issues, improve processes, refine customer loyalty, and enhance the overall customer experience.

For example, if you’re serving an underbanked population, you can consider developing a native digital wallet. 

7. Ensuring Security and Trust

Building customer trust through robust security measures is essential for elevating the customer experience. 

Customers must be confident that their financial information is protected and that their transactions are secure. Banks can build trust by implementing effective security practices.

Here are some examples of security measures all banks need to implement:

• Know Your Customer (KYC): This is an identity verification method that allows crypto exchanges to make sure they’re dealing with legitimate customers instead of terrorist organizations and people involved in money laundering. 
• Know Your Transaction (KYT): This protocol happens over a blockchain network, enabling banks to quickly verify transactions to avoid international money laundering and illicit terrorist funding activities. 
• Account Authentication: Whether through two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA), banks should take extra precautions to keep customer data safe from unauthorized access.
• Identity Verification: If you’re providing lending services or processing personally identifiable information (PII), it’s best to verify the identity of the user before granting them access to your system. 
• SOC1- and SOC2-certified partners: Working with SOC1- and SOC2-certified partners allows banks to improve security posture while meeting regulations, mitigating risks, building trust with customers, and ensuring operational integrity.

Seize the Opportunity To Improve the Customer Journey With AlphaPoint

Delivering a positive customer experience keeps customers coming back from more, improving the retention rate of a financial institution while reducing churn. 

To stay relevant in a rapidly evolving industry, financial institutions and banks with a large customer base need to meet their customers’ needs as they shift. With more and more people investing in cryptocurrencies, it may be time to find a partner that will allow your customers access to buy, trade, and sell digital assets. 

This is where AlphaPoint comes in. Our white-label solutions empower businesses to better serve their customers with exchange software, digital wallets, liquidity solutions and more that keep them competitive in the growing digital asset market.

Request a demo today to get started.